In mid-June, the Future Congress State & Administration took place under the patronage of the Federal Ministry of the Interior and for Home Affairs (BMI) and the SVA Public Service Office was there with a competent team. Colleagues report that they have rarely experienced such an open and constructive industry dialogue. The conference organization and not least the brilliant weather also contributed to the success. In the Rhineland, one would have said: "The Lorenz is burning", but at the Westhafen in Berlin we rather met a satisfied organization boss Oliver Lorenz (Wegweiser Media & Conferences GmbH).

An honest and critical assessment of the current situation was a common thread running through the panels, presentations and workshops, as was a spirit of optimism with the conviction that the right course has been set for successful digitization of the administration. Representatives from the federal, state and local governments are rightly placing great hope in the OZG 2.0 process. In recent years, the market has criticized the fact that too little attention has been paid to three key components of administrative transformation: The specialized procedures and processes must be considered end-to-end and digitized, while open standards must be established and written form requirements must be consistently overcome. All three aspects are now taken into account in OZG 2.0. This is the legal and organizational basis that we need as a digital industry to be able to profitably apply new technologies and established solutions, from cloud to endpoint security or from standard software to open source order development.

In his role as the representative of the OSBA (Federal Association for Digital Sovereignty), Thomas Köster from SVA particularly pointed out that we now want to take important steps toward more digital sovereignty for the administration. We therefore need close cooperation between system integrators, especially those from Germany and Europe, and those responsible for IT in the public sector, but also more adequate funding, for example at the BMI's Center for Digital Sovereignty (ZenDiS), as well as open standards and binding open source reference implementations. Here, too, most of the administration and industry representatives were in agreement - always with different emphases, but in principle. We hope that this signal of departure will now help us to be able to present significant progress in the coming year and are already looking forward to the Future Congress 2024.

Photos on the left: Sera Z. Kurc für VITAKO, photos on the right: SVA System Vertrieb Alexander GmbH